synatic|blog by Benedikt Deicke

Yesterday I decided to give Phusion Passenger aka mod_rails a try and installed it. It was dead simple to set it up and to deploy rails applications with it. I’m now using it for several “small” applications, for which the whole overhead of setting up a cluster of mongrels and...

News I try to keep up with Ruby and Ruby on Rails, even if I’m not working with one of them at the moment. These are the three feeds helping me to get the latest news: PlanetRubyOnRails.com, not to be mixed up with PlanetRubyOnRails.org, is a simple feed aggregator with...

Andreas Wolff recently released RSpactor, a (up to now) command line tool similar to autotest. Nevertheless it differs from autotest in two points. First it’s focused on RSpec and secondly it’s using Mac OS’ FSEvents to monitor file changes. According to this it only runs on Mac OS. To get...

Typing SSH passwords again and again can be a real pain. For example: Lately I started to use Capistrano to deploy my rails applications. If I want to set up the maintenance-page on the server I’ll type cap deploy:web:disable which of course prompts me for the SSH password. Then I...

There is a great article by Jason Long on Vitamin called ‘Streamline your forms with widgets’. In his article Jason Long describes a nice looking way to clean up a lot of checkboxes into multiple dropdown widgets. What I really liked was the idea to have some summary about the...

By default it’s not possible to use a database-column called “type” for anything else than single table inheritance. To change this, simply use set_inheritance_column() and read_attribute(): 1 class TypeTest < ActiveRecord::Base 2 set_inheritance_column(:something_else) 3 4 def type() 5 read_attribute(:type) 6 end 7 8 def type=(value) 9 write_attribute(:type, value) 10 end...

I needed a way to get a list of the subclasses that inherit a specific. Unfortunately there is no method like Class.subclasses (there is Class.superclass, though) so I had to look for another way to achieve this. Let’s say, we want to have an array containing all subclasses as a...

This short tutorial is going to show how to set up Lighttpd with fastcgi on Debian 4.0 (Etch). Actually it’s nothing special but I hope it demonstrates how easy it is. ;-) What is Lighttpd? Lighttpd is a light (I bet you already guessed that … ;)), fast and secure...